use Perl

Yesterday there was a London.pm technical meeting, which was cool. There was a good mix of technical / Perl / non-Perl related talks which all went smoothly. First off Nicholas Clark told us about Perl 5.8: its new features, its release schedule, and that we should all try running our custom programs with 5.7.3 (or bleadperl) to stomp out as many bugs as possible. I've been doing this at work (as it so happens) and the number of hash-order-dependence bugs in our code is quite impressive. I find I also get more warnings than the folks developing on 5.6.0, so overall it's a big win.

Richard Clamp talked about Acme::Your and scared us all by showing how he actually did it.

I then presented a small talk on pipelines, with the aid of Mr. Bunny. Pipelines are a software concept that we've talked about recently and my talk wasn't very serious at all. I'll put the slides up soon.

Simon Wilcox gave a well-balanced talk on Perl advocacy, which went really well. We're not all in hardcore Perl shops and it was great to hear his war stories.

Alex Gough told us all about what physicists do. Apparently they all make dimension errors and either blow up expensive spacecraft or worry about paying their gardener too much. Oh, and he talked about Data::Dimensions too.

Mark Fowler confused us with how to test the tester of the builder of the tester. Anyway, he talked building test modules with Test::Builder, which is what you want to do when it start to become hard to write your test scripts. Oh, and he had a lot of Buffy mentions in his code (apparently "steaks" kill vampires ;-). I think I'll be toying with that module soon...

We quickly retired to the pub (via the 24 hour bagel shop, of course) and talked about all the crazy things that Perl people talk about (user management, keeping warm at -50 degrees, Perl 5.10, Perl 6, Perl 5.5.4...).

Another great London.pm meeting!